Mindscape Web Workbench Permission Denied on SASS

I came across a problem today while working on a project in Visual Studio. I made a small change to a SASS file and tried to save it. However, Mindscape Web Workbench returned an error telling me there was a problem with permissions. This is how I fixed it.

It seemed that Web Workbench had difficulties accessing the SASS Cache location where temporary files are stored, edited and compiled before updating the project. There seemed to be a few different locations of the .sass-cache folders but the one that worked for me was in C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Windows\SysWOW64\.sass-cache. I cleared the entire contents of this folder and then restarted Visual Studio and I was able to modify my SASS files again.

To make it easier to find next time, I changed the location of the SASS cache files. Web Workbench lets you configure the location. In Visual Studio, go to Tools > Options > Web Workbench > SASS, there is a configuration setting for Location of Sass Cache. Update this to some centralised location and you will know where to look next time.

Til next time ...